A few weeks ago, I was coaching a CTO, and they asked me this question: "You seem to have a very strong online presence. Can you give me some pointers on where to start? Do I even need to do it?" This wasn't the first time I've been asked that. It's a common question I get from leaders at various points in their careers.
Other variations of that same question might be: How do I build a brand? Do I need a brand? How do I start sharing my thoughts online? What if I come off like a cheap influencer?
We're going to unpack the following in this post: Should you invest time in creating an online presence? How to do it the right way? What are the benefits of doing it? And what are the realistic returns you can expect from your efforts?
But before we get into anything, let's start with the grand 'why?' Why do anything?
Why do it at all?
On its surface, sharing your thoughts and opinions online feels like a thing humanity created in the last fifteen years or so, but the reality is, humans have been doing it since they gained consciousness. The oldest hand paintings are over 64,000 years old, found in the Cave of Maltravieso in Spain. Recently, an even older hand stencil was discovered in caves in South Africa, which were purported to be over 150,000 years old.
As Tiago Forte says in his book, Building a Second Brain:
"Self-expression is a fundamental human need. Self-expression is as vital to our survival as food or shelter. We must be able to share the stories of our lives—from the small moments of what happened today at school to our grandest theories of what life is about."
If you have no interest in building any online presence, professional or otherwise, you still have to figure out how to express yourself. You can write. You can paint. You can teach. You can tell stories. You can build companies.
Bottom line: there's nothing inherently wrong with putting your thoughts out there in the world in some shape. Obviously, there are people who take it too far and get trapped in the empty validation cycles social media offers, but there's nothing wrong or immoral about sharing with the universe how you perceive it. As long as you don't care about likes or retweets.
So the first thing I want you to take away from this post is that you don't have to give a reason to anyone to start expressing yourself online or otherwise. If you feel like it, do it. Ignore all the haters and the noise. Humans are hardwired for self-expression. Don't fight it.
With that out of the way, let's dig into the top three things a robust online presence might lead to.
Realistic outcomes
Corporate career opportunities
The simple answer is 'No.' Yes, having a polished online presence full of well-thought-out posts is a tremendous addition to your overall profile, but in itself it won't bring you career opportunities or advancements.
For example, if you're fresh out of college and have a tremendous online presence because you break down complex topics into understandable bite-sized posts, that won't lead you to that coveted job at one of the FAANG companies. What will get you that career opportunity or advancement is:
You have a track record of excellence in the field. So if you're an engineer, you've built solutions that are used by millions of people. If you're a leader/executive, you've successfully built teams that have delivered tremendous value to the company and its customers. Online likes and comments aren't enough. You need real-world wins. If you're fresh out of college, build things. Build apps, build products, and try to find customers for them. Even if you fail, you learn something from it and, more importantly, you can put it on your resume.
You know the right people. If you're an individual contributor, you've successfully networked with the right hiring managers and are in their network. If you're an executive, you've built positive relationships with other executives, including CEOs and board members, who will help you land your next gig. Also, successful networking doesn't involve connecting on social and immediately asking them for help. Successful networking means you help out unconditionally. When you throw care and positivity into the world, it will make its way back to you.
And that's it. Get the right experience and network with the right people to find your next gig. To be clear, an online presence will help you stand out against other candidates, but in itself, it won't help. I've also seen well-respected tech executives with zero online presence. On the flip side, I've personally interviewed and rejected well-loved professional influencers for leadership roles because it was clear that execution was not their strength.
Building a community
Humans have been building communities since they figured out how to stand upright. Humans are fundamentally social creatures, and communities of like-minded people satisfy our need to belong. It isn't just about belonging. Sharing space with others with shared interests and worldview prevents us from feeling lonely as we navigate our professional and personal lives. We can ask for and get help and eventually become better versions of ourselves.
Sharing your worldview publicly is a great way to build a community. In fact, in the beginning, when I started writing on LinkedIn, my intention was never to use it as a lead generation mechanism. It was always about finding and building a like-minded community. At its core, all my writing, LinkedIn, Substack, and my book were, are, and will continue to be my way of finding and nurturing my tribe.
Building a business
If you've built a community, you can decide to monetize it if you choose to do so. It isn't 'icky' to sell products and services to your community. It's about knowing the value of your knowledge and charging the right price. Your time is valuable, and you should be paid for it.
It doesn't matter if you're the CEO of an established company or a solopreneur trying to find customers for your online business—having a thoughtful and targeted online presence will help you find customers faster. Over the course of the last six months, I've built up my executive coaching business to a respectable six-figure income stream, and my online presence and my book have contributed greatly to it. Even when GenAI has scaled beyond our wildest imaginations, people will continue to buy from other people.
Lastly, building a durable business takes time. The knowledge I sell took me over two decades to acquire. It took me about a decade to build my community. I've been writing on LinkedIn for that long! It took a few years to figure out what products/services to offer. It took a few months to nail down pricing. I'm sure there are ways to do this faster if you don't have a day job, but my meta point is that these things take time and require perseverance.
Before we move on to how to get started and do things the right way, I want to address the elephant in the room. I haven't mentioned influencers. Yes, influencers make a lot of money, but the way they make it doesn't pass my morality test. Take the Logan brothers, for example. They became famous on YouTube by posting sensational content and using their platform to sell crypto scams or energy drinks that cause heart attacks. No thanks. My basic rule of thumb is: sell something that's built on your knowledge and credibility.
How to put yourself out there (the right way)
How to start?
Sharing my thoughts online was never a deliberate action. In fact, I was terrified of doing it. What if the world doesn't like it? What if people make fun of me? If I was so worried about sharing the words, why did I do it? I did it because the words rattling in my head demanded release, and when blogging took off in the early 2010s, I decided to use that as a way to give the words in my head a way out into the world and spread their wings. I didn't know it back then, but I was allowing self-expression to bloom inside me. At some point in your life, your consciousness will tell you it needs a way to express itself. Don't fight it.
Getting back to how to start. Just start. No one is going to make fun of you. No one is going to dislike your posts/content/art. No one is going to ridicule it. In fact, you might be your own worst enemy by being very self-critical. The worst thing that could happen to you is that nobody cares, which is what happened to me when I started, and that's completely OK. It doesn't matter if your first public post is fifty words or five hundred words. Remember, the first step is to just start. The rest will come later. Just start.
What to create and share?
Most (if not all) of you readers are tech professionals, so I'm going to stick to talking about creating and sharing content about your respective professional journeys.
There are numerous social platforms that will allow you to get your word out. However, if you're a tech professional just looking to get going, I recommend LinkedIn. Why? Primarily because there's a high chance you are already familiar with it, and your future tribe is already on the platform.
OK, so you've picked LinkedIn. What do you share? If you Google "What should I share on LinkedIn?", it will spit out a million different frameworks. There are many useful ones out there, but my advice, if you're just getting started, is to ignore all of them and share what's on your mind. I'm not talking about sharing what you had for dinner or the walk you took during lunch, but about what tickled your intellectual curiosity that day.
Maybe it was an interesting conversation you had with a colleague that led to an interesting insight. Maybe it was your own insight you got after reading something online. Maybe it's just an after-work reflection on work life. The bar I set for myself for what to post is, if I share this with someone intellectually curious, will they be interested enough to have a discussion with me about it? Pick authenticity over polish. In the words of Rick Rubin, the goal is not to play and win, but to play and play.
Once you get comfortable sharing on LinkedIn, I recommend picking one more platform to extend your reach, like Substack or Medium, if you want to grow your community and monetize it. LinkedIn is great for short-form content and building a community, but it isn't great for monetizing them. Substack and Medium, on the other hand, are purpose-built for monetizing your community.
Persevere
If you don't have any intentions behind building an online presence besides just sharing your thoughts online as a form of expressing yourself, you can skip the rest of this post. Read on if you want to build a community and/or a business afterward.
The very first posts will be exhilarating. If you're an experienced professional, there's a real chance that your tribe will start showing itself by engaging with your content. That will motivate you further to create more content. More engagement. More motivation. More creating. This cycle will continue until you hit your first creative block, and boy, it will suck.
When I hit my first creative block, I just gave up for a bit until the creative juices started flowing again. However, you can't use that as a remedy forever. The blocks will last longer, and it will become harder and harder for you to start creating again. I've come to the conclusion that the remedy is to push through the dry spells. There are a few techniques that I use regularly to get through my writer's block:
Switch up what I'm currently reading, listening to, or watching. If I was reading fiction, I switch to non-fiction and vice versa. This helps with jumpstarting my creativity.
Commit to writing 'something' every week. Even if what I write is gibberish and not worth sharing, I still write it down. I've written about fifty essays on Substack, but there are fifty more in the graveyard section of my Google Doc. Heck, I even wrote a short story that's on Substack somewhere. As Stephen King says, 'If you want to become a good writer, write every day.'
Give yourself a time-out from doom scrolling. Delete all social media from your phone and add web blocks on your laptops. What I've realized is that creative ideas that end up becoming my LinkedIn or Substack posts are not inside me. They're in fact outside me. All around me. To let them in, I need to make space for them inside me.
I didn't put 'ask AI for inspiration' on that list because it can't inspire you. It will regurgitate what's currently 'hot' on the platform. Inspiration is a uniquely human trait. Either you get inspired yourself because you experience something profound happening to you, or you become inspired by talking to another human.
After you successfully get through a few of your creative blocks, it will become a habit.
Selling
I'm not a sales expert, so I won't risk saying the wrong thing, but here's what I've learned from building my coaching business over the past six months. Creating thoughtful content on LinkedIn has provided tremendous social validation. When I reach out to a prospect in my network, my profile passes their sniff test before we even have a conversation.
However, if you're constantly pushing products and services in every post you create, you won't be successful. Audiences get tired very quickly of being sold to. I've seen well-intentioned professionals turn their LinkedIn feeds into infomercials, and their engagement drops off a cliff.
What surprised me most is that when you help people unconditionally through your content, they start reaching out to you. I get more inbound inquiries now than I ever did when I was actively trying to sell. People want to work with someone who clearly knows their stuff and isn't desperately chasing them down.
And coaching is just one product you can sell. There are also courses, newsletters, podcasts, etc, and many more products and services you can explore selling.
Get a coach
If you're serious about building an audience on social platforms, get a coach. All these platforms have unique quirks that a coach will instantly point out to you. For example, on LinkedIn, dropping a link in a post will cause the algorithm to throttle its engagement. Why? LinkedIn doesn't want its users to leave the platform. This is why experienced LinkedIn authors drop links in comments instead. I didn't know this until I talked to a coach.
If you're considering building an audience on LinkedIn, I highly recommend Natasha Walstra (https://www.linkedin.com/in/ndwalstra/). When I first met her, I had been writing for almost a decade on LinkedIn and considered myself somewhat of an expert, but within a few weeks of working with her, I realized how much I didn't know about the platform. To be clear, she didn't ask me to write this. I genuinely feel she's a great coach and deserves her flowers, that's all.
Summary
And that's it, folks. I hope this helps anyone looking to take their first steps in building an online presence. If you have additional thoughts or questions, please share them in the comments!